Using high technology to study environment

Warren County should take advantage of Tech Valley opportunities

Brian Nearin, Times Union

By Brian Nearing

Updated 7:01 pm, Friday, May 17, 2013

John Kelly III, senior vice president and director of IBM Research, addresses those gathered during an event at RPI on Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2013 in Troy, NY. The event was held for IBM and RPI to announce that IBM will provide a modified version of the IBM Watson system to the college for use by students and faculty. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union)

John Kelly III, senior vice president and director of IBM Research,...

Once the IBM supercomputer Watson is done studying how to cure cancer, the machine — or one of its descendants — might take on how to protect the waters of Lake George from pollution and invasive species.

Poised between a burgeoning Tech Valley and the Adirondacks, Warren County is in a unique position to bring what will be an emerging generation of high-tech environmental sensors to the Adirondacks, the head of global IBM research told county business leaders on Friday.

John Kelly III, who oversees 3,000 researchers in a dozen labs across 10 countries — including the lab in Yorktown Heights, Westchester County — said the county should get ready for a rising global tide of big data and connected computing, some of which is being created in the Tech Valley corridor. That area stretches from Yorktown Heights, through the nanotech center in Albany, and now, to the GlobalFoundries plant in Malta.

Speaking before several hundred people at the annual luncheon of the Warren County Economic Development Corp., Kelly said the county should find ways to educate its young people to take advantage of new jobs that nanotechnology and computing will be offering, and to be "friendly" to tech businesses that might want to locate there.

That advice might apply to many places, but Kelly also gave some insight on how the county could parlay its geographic location into a unique application of computing and sensing technology aimed at environmental challenges in the six-million acre Adirondack Park, the largest such park in the lower 48 states.

"We have to find a balance between environmental protection and economic growth," he said. "We will be in a position to have instruments on our waterways, our mountains and our air, to help us get our arms around the challenges," said Kelly, who has a Lake George summer residence on Assembly Point in Queensbury.

As an example of what is possible, he cited IBM-designed floating sensors on Galway Bay in Ireland, which monitor water conditions, marine life and wave activity in real time, and relay reams of data that eventually makes its way to the Internet. The effort is called SmartBay.

IBM is also working on a fledging data network to monitor the Hudson River with the Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries, a not-for-profit environmental group. Called the River and Estuary Observatory Network, the project has placed floating sensors in Beacon, Albany, West Point and Fort Edward.

"To help make decisions on how to manage our resources, we need more data," said Kelly. "We need to have our debates on what should be done based on facts."

To illustrate how ever-increasing computing power allows for a cascading torrent of data to be analyzed, he pointed to IBM's famous super-computer called "Watson." Two years ago, Watson gained worldwide notice by beating two human champions on the television program "Jeopardy!''.

Since then, the computer, which Kelly described as a "cognitive system" that can learn from past experience, is using its talents to research potential cures for cancer. The computer is being "trained" by human cancer specialists from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, as well as the Cleveland Clinic and the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, he said.

Humans should not feel too bad about being bested by Watson, which can perform 80 trillion operations per second. But to achieve that, Watson needs about 85,000 watts of power, which makes it a real energy hog compared to a brain, which works using only about 20 watts.